The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for compressing and decompressing digital data such as streaming video or audio data.
A transmitter of digital streaming data may apply a compression algorithm to the streaming data in order to reduce the amount of data sent over the network. For example, if a transmitter needs to send 200 megabits of information per image at a rate of 100 images per second, the total bandwidth requirement is 20 gigabits per second. If the compression algorithm has a 5:3 compression ratio, the total bandwidth requirement may be lowered to 12 gigabits per second.
Many methods exist for performing data compression. Some examples of such methods include transform coding, entropy coding, adaptive dictionary coding, chromatic subsampling, and other lossless or lossy methods.
Many of these data compression methods may require a significant hardware and software resource expenditure for both the transmitter to perform compression and the receiver to perform decompression. Examples of this hardware and software resource expenditure may include, but are not limited to, processor utilization, power utilization, and bandwidth utilization in communicating the data. Also, these expenditures may include other costs, such as the cost for electro-magnetic interference protection based on the high utilization of the processor and/or power resources. Additionally, for example, many mobile devices have dedicated digital signal processors (DSPs) specifically used for such applications in order to reduce the load on the main processor. Inclusion of DSPs may increase the price of the mobile devices, leading to another such expenditure. Further, even with DSPs, complex compression methods may create computational bottle-necks, increase power consumption, and cause unacceptable delays at the transmitter and the receiver.
Additionally, some devices may not have the computational capacity (software or hardware) to utilize complex compression methods due to limitations on their price, hardware performances, battery life, and/or time required to decompress the compressed data.
Therefore, improvements in data compression techniques are desired.